The Clancys of Queens by Tara Clancy Read Free Book Online

Channel didn’t have three meals a day—the Spencers, phew! Nuns at St. Virgilius used to put the leftover rice pudding from lunch aside for them kids to bring home as dinner! You wanna talk about college?! Look, Scooter, we didn’t have it that bad, but we didn’t have money either.”
    By the time he met my mom, Dad had already put in two years as a trainee at the 101st police precinct in Far Rockaway. You couldn’t go into the police academy until you were twenty-one, but trainees were paid a minimal salary to do clerical work in the station, and my dad was so underweight that one of his superiors told him he needed to use the three years to bulk up anyway. His boss insisted he eat a pound of bananas a day, which my dad did for so many days that at some point, and forever after, his face started contorting at the mere sight of one.
    —
    At nineteen, after my parents had been dating for a year, my mother tried to move out of her parents’ house to be on her own. Her plan was to live with her friend Barbara “Rollie” Iorollo and experience a little independence before deciding whether or not to marry my dad. But, knowing that my grandmother wouldn’t go for that plan, she plotted a quick escape.
    Rollie pulled up outside my grandparents’ brownstone one night, engine running, and my mom, suitcase in hand, walked up to my grandmother in the living room and blurted out the lines she had been rehearsing for an hour: “Ma, my friend is here to pick me up, and I’m leaving. I’m going to move in with her, and—”
    But before my mom could finish, my grandmother started wheezing. As my mom remembers it, Grandma went from zero to sixty in a flash—her chest started heaving, little beads of sweat rolled down the sides of her face, her inhalations growing longer and louder by the second, until, suddenly, with a great slap to the heart, she collapsed into a chair. My mother dropped her luggage and ran to her side.
    “I’ll DIE! I’ll die if you leave!!” Grandma screamed. My mother fell to the floor, wrapped her arms around my grandmother’s legs, and sobbed, “I won’t go, Ma. Please! Please calm down! I’ll stay, I promise.” To this day, my mother isn’t sure if my grandmother faked it. But that near heart attack, feigned or not, may be the reason I am here.

On Sunday, July 22, 1973, my mom walked down the aisle at St. Francis Xavier Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to meet my father at the altar. My parents’ reason for dating hadn’t boiled down to much more than a mutual physical attraction paired with a mutual “This is just what ya do” philosophy. So there they were, getting married in a ceremony officiated by not one but two priests—Father Petrowski and Father Maloney, the former of her home parish and the latter of my father’s St. Virgilius in Broad Channel.
    At the wedding reception, per Italian tradition, my parents went from table to table with a cream-colored satin string-tie satchel collecting
abusta,
envelopes filled with money.
    And then, per Irish tradition and to my mother’s dismay, everyone on my father’s side, from the geriatric great-aunts to the pimply-faced teenage nephews, got good and drunk. In defense of my Irish family, and according to my mother, only a small handful of them truly went overboard. And, if Italian tradition had not been to lock up their daughters so tightly (even that night at McNulty’s my grandfather waited outside in his truck for my mom, and afterward, on all of my parents’ dates before the wedding, she was always to be home by 9:00 p.m.), she may well have seen this coming, and either not have been so shocked or at least known when it was in good fun or not. (Unfortunately, as the subsequent years progressed, with the murder rate in his precinct climbing and the day-to-day violence my father saw on the job taking its toll on him, my mother would learn the difference between “good, fun drinking” and the other kind.)
    Following the wedding my